After Neubix, ustwo are my favourite design studio. Take a look at this in-depth interview with Mills, Chief Wonka at the fampany. Mills talks about more than just good design “I resolutely believe that in order to reach the heights of your ambition you need to put absolutely everything into what you do — everything.”

Learning from Frank Yoo, Director of Product Design at Lyft. 9 designers, 3 researchers and 3 design pods to serve their user groups of Passenger, Driver and Enterprise. Teams gain deep domain know-how on each type of user and help each other. Lyft are going places!

I missed this one last week! The Government Digital Service (GDS) talks about gender diversity at events. They list out some principles, including Owen Barder’s pledge of no-one from GDS will take part in a panel discussion of two or more people unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the chair. Glad that my next speaking engagement is addressing gender diversity as well.

“When you make assumptions about your users, you run the risk of being wrong. When you embed wrong assumptions in the design of your product or service, you alienate people.” Great insight from author Erika Hall here. Local designer Natasha Hockey reviews Erika’s new book.

Using an automated translator or outsourcing low-cost translation services may be a quick solution, but not often the best. While the top language used on the internet remains English (for now), the number of users living in non-English-speaking countries far surpass those where English is the native tongue. Usertesting provide 3 tips on what to do.

“Statistics show that 97% of people don’t purchase anything in their first visit to an eCommerce website” say Strawberrysoup - a full-service digital agency. Testing is the central argument here and try to not spam. “If customers feel like they’re due an onslaught of pop-ups every time they visit your website then they’ll be put off.”

“Higher usability is, in fact, a requirement to win the market competition and to retain customers from turning to other choices.” With technology constantly improving, ecommerce brands must continually test and iterate to improve user experience.

When it comes to eCommerce checkout, what are retailers doing right? What are they doing wrong? Whatusersdo asked 21 UX, eCommerce and CRO experts for their opinion. My key takeaway: “Our brains don’t like leaving tasks incomplete, so when we can see our progress and predict what’s coming next, it helps grease the skids towards conversion.”

Automattic, makers of WordPress, don’t have offices or email. Matt Mullenweg notes “I’ve never heard anyone who’ve said they love email, they want more of it–have you?” Automattic use Slack and an internal WordPress site. Dogfooding and chat apps are the new communication flows.

Adobe XD is out now on Mac. Mike Barker shares his first impressions. While it has a lot of potential, there’s a lot of missing features, and tools like Sketch are already out-innovating. Great to see this space hotting up!